Tuesday, September 22, 2009

When a young artist finally gets to the point at which they have enough audience and charm to work their way into a professional studio, the excitement often runs so high that they fail to realize what is actually occurring to their music. Often, the perspective of the producer does not line up with the original vision of the artist for their music. I think it's pretty apparent when you look at artists who art out as folk acts and all of a sudden have extreme string arrangements and monstrous rhythm sections.

I think that the appeal of simplistic music has been underestimated for decades. As the increasing capability of technology has extended the potential reach of musicians and producers alike, it also draws focus to inclusion of all types of content that could not normally be created by a core band.

From my experience of working with a group of different studio producers, I realized that each of them has been involved in variant projects that ranged from classical compositions to rock influenced reggae. The artists who have brought their content to the table are coming from drastically different realms of music, and the integrity of their compositions deserves variant production techniques that respect those different spheres of musical innovation.

Often, an artist will have some very original material, but the immersion of that material into a studio-produced format will take the originality away a bit. EVERY musician in the whole world knows how to hammer out a 4/4 rhythm, so why do studios feel the compulsion to add percussion tracks doing so into every song written in that time signature? I feel like it numbs the ear quite a bit, hearing the same thing over and over again.

I suggest step back from the pulsating rhythms and so forth, there's been more than a fair share of exploration in that area by hip hop artists and jazz players. Let's focus on allowing melodies and nuance to thrive without stifling them. The percussion is really neat as just being a garnish anyway, a way of tying a whole piece together even, but it gets to overpowering sometimes and it kills the originality of music more often than not.